Yuri Corrigan studies the intersections of literature, philosophy, religion, and psychology in modern Russian, European, and American culture with a focus on the Russian nineteenth century. His first book, Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self (2017), traces Dostoevsky’s artistic meditation on the the human being as it took shape over the course of his career, presenting Dostoevsky’s unique theory of the personality against the backdrop of romantic, psychoanalytic, modernist, mystical, and existentialist thought. He is working on two new book projects, the first a series of contemporary literary dialogues with Dostoevsky, titled The Vanishing Soul, which explores how novelists today (such as Donna Tartt, Elena Ferrante, D.F. Wallace, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Michel Houellebecq, and Marilynne Robinson, among others) have drawn on Dostoevsky’s works in pursuit of new models of inwardness and personhood for the contemporary and post-psychoanalytic world. The second, Chekhov as a Moral Thinker, explores the significance of Chekhov’s ethical thought both for our own time and for Russian and European culture at the fin de siècle.
Learn about his latest research and activities via his profile page at the Department of World Languages & Literatures.